by John Marsden
We got halfway there, and that’s where things started to go wrong.
With a horrible lurch of my stomach I saw a sentry, with a rifle slung across his back, appear suddenly from the left. He was walking quickly along by the rail. I nearly called out but realised I couldn’t. Homer saw the sentry a fraction of a second later, but by then the soldier had seen him. The man moved with amazing speed. Swivelling, so that his back was to the rail, he began to unsling his rifle. Although his eyes were on Homer I was actually closer to him. I ran straight at him. He was bringing the rifle up so quickly I thought he would be able to fire it into my stomach at point-blank range. I covered the last three metres in a frantic dive, not having any idea of what I was going to do, just desperate to stop him pulling the trigger. What I did was to hit him somewhere between his chest and stomach with my head. I felt a hard impact, hurting my head and jarring my neck, but above that I felt relief as he fell backwards. He hadn’t been able to fire. I was all over him as he fell but, to my horror, we kept falling. I realised that we’d both gone over the rail. I was beating my arms in panic, trying to get away from him. We fell and fell. I just couldn’t believe how far we fell. How high was this ship? I thought maybe we were in dry dock and I was about to land on steel and concrete.
I heard a choking scream and realised it was the soldier, then there was a volley of shots right next to my head. His rifle was firing; I guess by accident. The sound completely deafened me. Then we hit the water. It felt like concrete: I hit it with my shoulder, and thought I’d broken my collarbone with the impact. I was about a metre from the sentry and I twisted by instinct and wriggled away under water to get a few more metres away. As I surfaced, I saw Homer enter the water in a perfect racing dive, about fifteen metres away. ‘Bastard,’ I thought, jealous of him for having such an easy passage. I swam awkwardly towards him, looking all the time for the soldier but seeing no sign of him. Maybe he’d sunk straight away. Maybe he’d accidentally shot himself. Maybe he’d swum under water and was about to come up right in front of me.
The shock to my shoulder was starting to wear off, although my neck was still hurting. As I got to within two metres of Homer there was a sudden spitting and foaming or water in a long line to my left. I thought of sharks. ‘What is it?’ I yelled at Homer. He looked equally shocked and confused. Then he took a funny sort of backward stroke, as if I’d slapped him in the face. ‘Bullets!’ he screamed. His voice sounded thick and muffled through my deafened ears. I looked around in panic. Had the soldier resurfaced? Was he now firing at us? Impossible, surely. ‘Go under!’ Homer yelled, and disappeared. I gasped at some air and turned turtle, swimming down deep deep deep, till my ears started to hurt. As I did so I realised the obvious: that the bullets must be coming from the ship or the wharf. I swam as far and as hard as I could, ignoring my sore neck but not able to go very smoothly or quickly. My lungs were empty, my chest was contracting, my stomach cramping. I had to go up. I did so, popping out of the water into the cold night air and taking an immediate swift look around, even as I wheezed for air. I couldn’t see anyone: the soldier or Homer. I couldn’t hear anything. Then a strong light caught my eye. It was lifting into the sky. It was a helicopter leaving the wharf and heading my way. They sure weren’t wasting time. At the same time, another row of splashes in the water ten metres to my right proved that bullets were still flying, even if I couldn’t hear them. I could hear the chopper though, and could see the white searchlight from its belly turning towards me. I cursed and dived again. There was no time to look for Homer; I had to get going. The ship was due to blow up in fifteen minutes and it was going to be bloody dangerous to be anywhere near it. I again swam as fast and far as possible, only coming up when my body was leeched of every molecule of air. I knew I’d breathe water if I stayed under a second longer.
I could see the white of the searchlight through the water and I avoided that, but the helicopter was coming right in over my head and very low, buffeting the water violently. It was churning up waves and making me even colder. I gasped for air, shivering with terror, took a deep breath and went under again. I’d got some second wind and was able to make better progress, but it wasn’t like swimming in the Wirrawee pool; I seemed to be getting waterlogged, and not going nearly as fast as I’d have liked. My energy was going in all directions: I was worrying about the explosion, worrying about Homer, terrified of the bullets and the chopper, and trying to swim, all at the same time. What a mess. Maybe if we’d eaten and drunk more I’d have had some energy.
Surfacing again, away from the helicopter light, I looked back at the ship. There were soldiers lined along the rails with weapons trained at the water. One of them actually saw me and shouted and pointed: I was shocked, as I’d thought I’d be invisible in the darkness. But there was a lot of reflected light from the spotlight. His gun turned towards me and I duck-dived fast and deep. I thought they’d expect me to swim away from them so I went back towards the ship, hoping that the explosion was a long way off. The helicopter light swept through the water and past me; it was almost vertical, so I knew the chopper was very close. I turned again and headed for the ship’s stern, then, taking one quick breath, set out across the bay, fast, hoping I’d thrown them off. ‘Flat out, Ellie,’ I begged myself, ‘go harder, never mind how much it hurts.’ I knew there was no more time for strategy: that backtracking had been the last throw of my dice. If they saw me now, they saw me. I just had to get well away from that ship before it blew.
I ploughed on grimly. I’d gone maybe eighty metres when I nearly lost my head. I was coming up with bursting lungs, not a wisp of air left in my body, when a huge grey churning shape screamed through the water just metres in front of me. Again, stupidly, I thought it was a shark but it would have broken world records if it was. I realised then that it was the hull of a boat, some kind of gun boat, probably. If it had been a bit closer I really would have lost my head. The wake hit me and threw me backwards. I grabbed a breath as I went, but half of it was water. I had a glimpse of more spotlights as I twisted and went under again. I couldn’t see any clear path to the other side of Cobbler’s Bay but I knew I had to keep going in that direction, no matter what. If Kevin was right about the explosive power of anfo I’d need to be out of the water and well into the bush when it blew up. There didn’t seem to be much chance now that I’d get that far – I’d lost too much time already – but I just had to get as far as possible. In my mind was the image of that container filling and filling with oxygen; the fuse steadily snaking its glowing way towards it; the massive blast that now might be only moments away.
I was helped and hindered then by something else I hadn’t counted on. Some force, like a silent invisible underwater wave, hit me and threw me forward. I couldn’t swim with it or against it; it was too powerful. My first thought was that the ship had blown up and this was the shock wave. I went tumbling through the water like a plastic bag in a windstorm. My arms and legs were thrashing around trying to get some control, but failing. I forgot about breathing but at least had the sense to try to get to the surface. Without knowing how I suddenly realised I had broken through into air and was lying on the surface gasping and sobbing. My head felt funny, all numb and stupid. As the wild waves rocked me I got a glimpse of the ship, as large and secure as ever. It didn’t look like it had just blown up.
White water sprayed up around me. Bullets again, only metres away. The sharp cold wind they made brought me to my senses. I took a roll and went under, having no energy to go deep, but at least striking out in the right direction, towards the wooded shore. I felt a thud on my back, like someone had hit me with a stick, or a stone, but I kept going.
The grey hull raced past again, to my right, a bit further away than last time. I thought they must be throwing bombs or hand grenades or something in the water. Depth charges maybe. When I came up for air this time I risked everything on taking a quick look. There seemed to be only one patrol boat looking for us and that had it
s back to me. The helicopter was screaming angrily across a patch of water a hundred metres to my right; its searchlight showing every white fleck, every grey-green ripple. I hoped they hadn’t found Homer over there somewhere. I glanced back at the container ship and checked again that it showed no signs of an explosion. It looked very comfortable. But for the first time I felt that I was making progress. Although the shore seemed no closer, the ship was now quite a long way away. I was just sorry to see it was on its own; the oil tanker must have left harbour. At least the quick sighting gave me the encouragement I needed to keep my effort going. I freestyled a fast twenty metres before diving again, breaststroking down deep. There was a dull ache in my back but that wasn’t slowing me; my neck, where I’d collided with the sentry’s chest on the ship, was the biggest problem.
The main fear I felt now was of sharks. If I were bleeding anywhere, which seemed quite likely, I would attract sharks like shit attracts flies. The ironic thing was that the helicopter and the gunboat, in hunting me, were my best chances of keeping the sharks away. They were so loud and big and alien that they must surely frighten sharks as much as they frightened me. I kept that grim hope firmly in my head as I ploughed on through the choppy water.
I was alternating freestyle with under water. I was too tired to go under water all the time. As I felt the boat roar up behind me again, I dived and went as deep as I could. The wash this time wasn’t quite as violent: the boat must have turned a bit further away.
I surfaced, trembling with cold and exhaustion and fear. Rolling onto my back I looked for the container ship again, hoping it would now be so far away that I would feel good, be encouraged to battle on for the shore. For a moment I couldn’t see it, because the swell was above me. Then the swell lifted me and I had a grandstand view. There was the ship and there was the helicopter, wheeling to the left above the stern, obviously about to charge back across the water and sweep another stretch.
At that moment the ship simply lifted out of the ocean. One millisecond it was there; the next it was up there. It actually seemed to hang in the air for a moment and I saw its back start to break. And then came a light: a huge bright light, like a phosphorescent flower, so white and blinding that it hurt my eyes. Briefly, night became brightest, sharpest day. I was hit by a tremendous noise, a crack, like the biggest stockwhip in the universe. It seemed to break the sky apart. It felt like it was vibrating through me. It was like a concert I’d gone to at Wirrawee Showground, when I’d been right near the speakers, and I’d felt my body was resonating with the music.
A million shooting stars, some of them huge, were flying in all directions. I couldn’t believe how far they travelled. Quite a few whooshed loudly over my head then fell and sizzled in the ocean behind me. Others went way way up in the air.
There was an awful rumbling, like the sea was about to vomit its darkest secrets. Then a crash that went on forever. The trees, the shoreline, the water – all seemed to rock, as though they were being reorganised. My mouth opened in fright. Something caught my eye, something up high, almost out of view. I looked up. It was the helicopter, tumbling out of the sky. It looked like a huge wasp that had been hit by a spray of Mortein. With the scream of a tortured soul it fell and fell. The sound was so high-pitched that I could hear it even above the booming of the explosion. The chopper hadn’t seemed to be up very high but it must have been, because it took forever to fall. It went end over end, three times I think, till it was obvious that it couldn’t recover, could never pull out. Then it hit, in an instant volcano of white water. I couldn’t see what was happening in the middle of the volcano. The water went up so high, then fell back in slow motion. When I could see through the spray again there was nothing, just a great wild boiling of white water. The rumbling of the exploded ship was as loud as ever, rolling around and around Cobbler’s Bay. I glanced to my right in terror, expecting to see the hills collapsing in on the bay, the whole world blown up. But the dark hills did not seem to have moved. They were the only things that hadn’t.
Then came the most frightening sight of all. When I looked back to where the ship had been, once again there was nothing to see. It was like a giant grey paintbrush had suddenly painted everything out. It took me a split second to realise what it was. I wish I hadn’t taken that second; I’d needed it to get ready, to take some evading action, to defend myself. There was a wave bearing down on me, a wave so vast that I cowered in terror, waiting to be crushed. It was sucking the water from under me, building itself into a gigantic wall. As it towered above me it blocked out the very sky. I know that I screamed: I felt my mouth open and my throat tighten with the effort of making a great noise, but I didn’t hear a trace of it. I was picked up like a bit of old seaweed, like a scrap of driftwood, and hurtled so fast that I could have been travelling in a car. I was sure I’d be broken into splinters of bone and shreds of flesh by the wild force of it. It was like being in a washing machine gone mad; an out-of-control washing machine about to shake itself apart. It was like being in the world’s fiercest dumper, every bad wave I’d ever caught multiplied a thousand times. I don’t know what I did for breath; I don’t think I had any in my lungs, but the pain from there went unnoticed as my body got tossed and tumbled in this wet tornado. Amazingly, I did have time for one clear thought and even more amazingly it was a joke, sort of. I thought, ‘Well, at least the sharks won’t find me in this.’ I didn’t get around to laughing, though.
Then the wave smashed itself against the shore. The land held; the wave didn’t. It flung itself to pieces on the rocks, the trees, the ground. I felt myself touch bottom with my hip, then bounce, hit again, get turned over and over, hit again, this time with the back of my head, get scraped along dirt or gravel or something, hit something else with my bad knee and then get rolled along, bashing everything I could find. I was deaf and blind and concussed; I could hear the thundering noise continuing to crash and vibrate around me, but I didn’t know if it was in my head or if it was really happening. I lay there thinking I was probably dead.
Chapter Fifteen
I felt like I’d been beaten with truncheons on every inch of my body. I had so many aches and pains that I didn’t know which part of myself to feel sorry for first. When I realised I was alive I hauled myself up onto all fours, then used a small tree trunk to get on my feet. I hung on to the tree, willing myself to find some energy. Behind me, wave after wave was crashing onto the shore. It was a long time before they started to quieten down. By then I was back on all fours, unable to stand without feeling sick and dizzy. I didn’t give a moment’s thought to what we’d done. It seemed unreal, and irrelevant. All I could do was survive the next moment, the next minute. It was impossible to tell where I was: just somewhere on the shore of Cobbler’s Bay, and probably a few k’s from Baloney Creek where Homer and I had arranged to meet the others. I didn’t think about Homer though; he could have been alive or he could have been dead, or he could have been somewhere in between, but there was nothing I could do for him.
My mind just wouldn’t work: nothing would connect. All I knew was that I had a terrible craving for fresh water and that I was terribly cold and that I couldn’t cope with the pain. I heard a gurgle of water near me, striking quite a different note to the roar of the waves behind, so I crawled to that. But when I found the little stream and sank my face into it all I could taste was salt. It had probably been flooded by the tidal wave that Homer and I had created.
I had another go at getting upright and this time was more successful. I started to wonder about the chances of soldiers finding me, but thought they would probably be too busy back at the wharf – if any of the wharf was left, which was unlikely. My thirst forced me forwards. I took a couple of hesitant steps, trying to work out which leg was the better. There wasn’t much in it, but the left one seemed to at least have a functioning knee. I put more weight on that and hobbled uphill into the bush.
I don’t know where I wandered that night. I foun
d some fresh water eventually and lay with my face soaking in it for ages, cold though it was. I drank like a dog, lapping noisily and greedily, coughing when I swallowed too much, but gulping down more even while I was recovering from the coughing fit. After that I staggered on for a while, holding my head in both hands and wishing it would stop hurting. I had enough sense to know that I shouldn’t stop and lie down when I was so wet, so I kept walking till my clothes were just damp, then lowered myself carefully between two logs and lay there shaking. I couldn’t sleep, but spent most of the time trying painfully to get into more comfortable positions. My hips got really sore on the hard ground. I think I probably did have a couple of short uneasy dozes, but I really don’t know.
I felt my back as best as I could. It was sore and tender, but the skin wasn’t broken. It didn’t seem like a bullet had hit me, so that was one less worry.
Some time before dawn I started out again. I hadn’t given any thought to where I should aim; my only ambition was to put as much distance between me and Cobbler’s Bay as possible. That was sensible considering the uproar that would be raging back there. I crossed a road at one stage but it never occurred to me that I could use it to navigate to our meeting point. I was just so scared to be on it that I stumbled quickly across and ran into the thicker bush on the other side.
My headache was better after the brief rest I’d had, but now I had another urgent need. I was desperately hungry, so hungry that I felt dizzy for need of food. I couldn’t find any energy without food to charge me up. As the light grew better I started looking for something, anything, to eat. I found a few late blackberries, sad wizened little fruit, but I ate them. I was trying to remember the occasional TV shows I’d seen about bush tucker but the memories had all gone and nothing I saw looked edible.